Dear Mr. You (2 page)

The commander ordered a brief stop so the soldiers could rest. Not sleep, but have water or stare impassively at their wounds and one another. Smoke. As the hundreds of soldiers sat, you kept walking until your back of the line became the middle. Dragging your leg, you were the only one walking until you’d blown all the way to the front with a bullet in your thigh. When the commander ordered everyone up they began to pass you again, pushing you to the rear until another stop was called, but you limped through that break too. You dragged yourself by soldiers sitting on their helmets chewing tobacco, sharing a pack of Life Savers. Some had their heads in their hands while standing otherwise at attention. They were arrested in space with nowhere to go, looking like the statues that would one day represent them in public spaces, with plaques describing this battle and their bravery.

This went on an entire day longer, with you managing to hold the middle by not accepting the back. Your hand was melded to your rifle and aching like the dickens but you heaved onward, kept not taking that break. At some point when you still hadn’t died, trees cleared and there was legitimate light. You were medevaced out, only to be back in combat a month later with your first Purple Heart, which you said you never understood. You’d ask, “Why do they give you a medal for being dumb enough to get shot?”

Months later, you were shivering under a blanket in Manila, thinking about getting home in time to call that girl about a date for New Year’s. You hadn’t stopped thinking about her since
that day at the bank. She’d floated over with a note from some other gal. Her eyes were so brown. She had skin that looked like a bowl of fruit with cream painted on top, and seemed as though she might stick by a man, but quietly, with a little orchestra of sighs and run-on sentences. You asked someone what her story was. Apparently she was going to Averett College in the fall, and you remembered that while you were sitting by that campfire in the middle of war a year later. You wrote her a letter by the light of that fire, on the top of the page scrawling the words
FROM SOMEWHERE IN THE PHILIPPINES.

Thirty years later, my teen European-tour-to-meet-boys fell through when my friend’s parents said no. I was devastated and you couldn’t bear it. You sold or mortgaged something and booked a family Euro-tour—not my dream, but you were so happy to give me this trip you couldn’t afford that I acted excited, hoping there would be a boy on a train who would not know English and kiss me, but there were no cute boys. There was only a man on a pier in Monte Carlo who thought I was a prostitute, but the trip had moments. You and I woke early in Amsterdam to go to the diamond factory to get Mom a ring. Once there, you pushed me (“Pick one for you and your sister, please, I want you to”), so I picked the smallest, praying it was also the cheapest, but you insisted on a bigger one. We took a boat back to the hotel and I remember your face looking out over the water. I could see all the weight on you. You were dreaming and planning, brimming with if-onlys.

•  •  •

Going up Sixth Avenue in a taxi, your grandson said, “Mommy, aren’t there so many amazing things in the world? Aren’t we so lucky to be alive?” That’s you in him, Daddy. He’s so like you, full of extremes and heavy on the dream space. Both kids put their fists up for each other and I know that would make you happy. I try to teach them pacifism but sometimes it’s only halfhearted. “Lady, this outfit you are running here is a bunch of bull,” you said to that librarian who accused me of lying about how many books I’d read. “Mean lady, you are the f word,” Will said to the woman in the dog park who called me stupid for leaving the gate open.

My children may never see me hunched over a checkbook and sense my mounting panic, or come home late and find me in the street armed with a shovel as I take the driver of a car by the neck when liquor is smelled on him. They will watch me make much of their victories and hold a grudge until my last breath if someone treats them cruelly. This is your family I am running here. I can’t take credit for more than remembering to point to you when I do something right and for continuing to put one foot in front of the other when I lose heart.

We all miss you something fierce, those of us who wouldn’t exist had you not kept walking when an ordinary person would have fallen to his knees. To convey in any existing language how I miss you isn’t possible. It would be like blue trying to describe the ocean.

Where did you go?

Did you fly away and leave the barrio? Most Yaqui Indians never move away. Hard life had pushed your people to the ghetto of that ghetto where I went so many days after school. I learned your streets from the window of a lowrider, the hydraulics making the car hump the pavement while we listened to Earth, Wind and Fire or the Sugarhill Gang. You must have heard us as we rode by, with Gloria and Alicia shouting, “HOTEL! MOTEL! WHAT YOU GONNA DO TODAY? (SAY WHAT?)” Arturo would drive us. He’d poke Sammy Z in the ribs and say,
ai, chécalo, look at those.
He’d point to the girls’ asses bobbing up and back to the music while they stuck their heads out the window. The boys had their hair greased back and their chinos on, and the girls shellacked their feathered hair so hard with, like, a half bottle of Final Net each, they said. It would blow up from the wind in two flat pieces like horns, and their jeans? Homegirl could work
some camel toe. They knew they were foxy. Those asses would never be so titanic again in their lives, you could serve a whole flan off those
culos
and it wouldn’t even jiggle. My friend and I would sit between the other girls, embarrassed but thrilled, whispering about Sammy Z while mouthing to each other,
Órale vato! Que barrio!
, but not loud enough for anyone to hear us.

What did you do, Yaqui boy? Did you do like Sammy and most of the Mexican boys, marry the girl you took to prom? In Guadalupe everyone had a place. The Yaqui Indians, your people, had their space farther out. I wouldn’t have seen you before and I don’t even know where you went to school. My one good friend when I was fifteen was Mexican and she brought me to your hood. In the overly white community where I lived, all was murderously medium. It was hard to locate yourself there, where everything was a moderate version of something that didn’t dare reach too far up or dip beneath the middle. I went to the barrio instead, trailed along to every Posada and
quinceañera
; anywhere there were empanadas and mariachis that ended their sets with “Sabor a Mi.” You would never have come to my street where every boy was a football star and every girl a popular cheerleader. I hated them while sometimes wishing I was one too, a girl who was invited to dances, walked home, or occasionally felt up by a creepy uncle.

I was never noticed in my fifteenth year except by you, deer dancer. It was your Pascala and my Easter. I walked through Guadalupe to the far field, where white girls whispered that Mexicans took victims and tied them up with phone cords to rape them. That didn’t scare me half as much as walking the halls at school and I didn’t believe them anyway. I was the only white person for miles and
blanca
I
was pale as notebook paper without the lines. I noticed the houses getting smaller and the yards more chaotic, overrun with broken cars and swing sets that served as laundry lines. We started to see more of your people as they walked to their Easter, the big holy day. Soon there was just the smell of dough frying and clusters of people, some in costume. My friend headed for the biggest group, packed so tightly that we couldn’t see what they were looking at. Flashing her brilliant smile at a neighbor, she grabbed my hand and he made space for us so we could slip in front.

You were there. There was an old man feet away from you, playing a drum made out of a gourd floating in water. Someone was singing in Yaqui, that language so heavy on article and air, its sounds so untenably painful that every note was someone begging or losing. The music was only background though, because I was watching you. My friend whispered

The drum is the deer’s heart, floating, and the sticks they play are the breath in his body

I don’t know how long it took for you to hypnotize me into reverie. Before the crowd parted I’d seen your antlers above the people and part of me had worried, oh God, not an animal sacrifice, I am an Episcopalian after all, I can only jive with so much, but it wasn’t. It was you, sacred, beautiful boy. You were dancing with a full shed of antlers on your head while your audience stood rapt and reverent.

By legend the deer dancer has to be summoned to dance, receiving the invitation in his sleep. It’s a calling in your culture,
where grave decisions are made based on dreams and flowers. Photographing a deer dancer was not allowed and signs of warning were posted. For those who believe, the dance is a fortification so strong that it purifies just to watch it, and since you don’t know how many dances you will see in your lifetime, you should see every one you can. You were my one and despite your shaggy black hair and dirty face you felt as much a deer as any I’ve seen disappearing into the trees. Though probably my age, you’d had more thrown at you and lived harder. Your lower body was so thoroughly covered in red earth that it seemed you’d been left in the sun to rust.

I moved a half step closer, and sensed something more than saw it. A question loomed and the answer couldn’t possibly be yes to
does he see me
but it was. I could feel myself being seen, though you weren’t looking at me as much as dancing at me, finding me from some radar at the tip of your antlers while arching in my direction. You’d caught my frequency from where I stood at the edge of the crowd, trembling. Your chest was brown enough to make that dirt look like a softer shade of chalk as your breath made your ribs appear and recede. My pulse quickened when your deer raised up as if tracking a mate nearby. Your body was equal parts human and animal; it made me feel safe and hunted in the best way. I wanted to pet you and feed you, I wanted you to chase me and take me with your teeth. I wished you could turn my legs that red dirt color by pinning me to the ground underneath you.

Too abruptly the singing stopped. For a moment you were frozen so still that I began to doubt you’d ever actually moved. When you finally relaxed, you bent over with your hands on your knees, coming back. One of the musicians gave you a handful of
cigarettes and some of the men reached for them in exchange for a small tip as a sign of respect. Looking around almost wearily, you ignored them and didn’t stop. Instead you walked across that circle and closed it. You aimed straight in my direction. I stayed fixed on you, your brown eyes, your mouth as you advanced to me, who’d never had a boy walk to her before. Not in that way, to choose her. The last few steps of your approach, with all the men trailing behind, your face was square on and meeting mine at its most open. Taller than I realized, you gazed down as my legs shook, my arms all goose flesh with you only a deer’s distance away. We stared into each other until you held up a cigarette and said

Quieres?

I shook my head no. You shrugged. I offered a smile, really more than I’d ever willingly given any boy. You smiled back and sighed quietly, turning and walking sideways for a few steps to not close off from me, I thought. A quick last glance and you were off, walking alongside the
Fariseos
as they pelted you with flowers.

•  •  •

There are relatively few of your tribe left, do you count each other? They sold your people for twenty-five or fifty centavos a head, you were hunted like the deer but no one talks about this. No one knows you. Where I grew up your people lived and still live, not far from the desert where those deer run wild, most of those animals not living longer than four years. Mountain lions, men with archery kits bought online, there are too many hunters for deer to live out their potential life span. Their greatest
downfall is mating season. That’s when a buck grows careless, letting go of those eyes in the back of his head. If he gets that twitch, hoping a mate is nearby, he will turn right toward that trace of something, suddenly dreamy and reckless. That hope can lead him straight into a bullet; desire then becoming just another hard way for a deer to fall.

I remember staring at the Avedon poster of the Beatles when I was four and a half.
Years old
. It was taped to the wall behind my sister’s bed and I would bore holes in it, staring at them while she played their records, which I already knew. When I was seven or so I was putting on a play in my backyard for an audience of zero, called “Imposter Beatles.” My character was a girl named Sweetie who was seduced by four men claiming to be John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Sometimes the girl down the block joined in but usually I enacted the whole thing alone or with my dog. The beginning was a montage where Sweetie received compliments from Paul about her personality and halter dress, followed by a section where she played on the swings while they serenaded her with songs from
Revolver
. At some point she began to tap into clues that these were imposters with a plot to kidnap her. Some days Sweetie was gagged and handcuffed by the Faux George, with sadomasochistic implications that were probably unsettling,
having been conjured by a second-grader. The play ended with me atop a dirt mound in my yard, arms raised and reaching for the escape rope tossed by helicopter from the genuine Paul McCartney. Paul climbed down and risked his life, all the while singing “Here, There, and Everywhere.” The whole thing satisfied my rescue fantasies and my need to be validated by a rock star while wearing a halter dress. I wrote a letter to a television station trying to get some interest, but my parents never mailed it.

By the time I found you I was still devoted to the Beatles but I was in high school and ready for something else. Rickie Lee Jones and The Smiths were a couple years away but your music was on time. It was a shove that made me want to fight back. My brother brought me your records one by one. We’d sit in his room and listen to each track with him jumping up and diving into air guitar or stopping to move the needle back so we could re-listen to a lyric. Sometimes he’d lend me one overnight so I could listen as I fell asleep, and when it ended I’d tiptoe over in my nightgown and start the whole record over with the volume lower. You were showing up on my porch when I listened to your records, driving me away in your banged-up car. This was better than my actual life and the metallic taste of rage on my tongue that I couldn’t even locate or explain to anyone. You were a loner in a small town too, isolated and branded weird. I put on your records and imagined the two of us finding each other, both alienated and starving for affection. I snuck out my bedroom window to meet you in abandoned amusement parks and garages, I could feel your leather jacket against my cheek, and see the relief in your face when I showed up, someone who never accused you of sulking or being strange. For the whole
length of your song we ran through alleys and whispered on pay phones. I nursed you after brawls in the parking lot, sneaking home your white T-shirt and scrubbing the blood out of it in secret, all the while defending you to my imaginary friends who worried about me for dating a monosyllabic hoodlum with a broken muffler.